Another film where I feel Ebert totally missed the mark is Fight Club. Read it. He doesn’t just give it a bad review he practically says that every single print & negative of the film should be burned for the sake of the betterment of humanity! I loved it, I think its David Fincher’s masterpiece! That rare combination of serious social commentary and biting wit over-the-top sarcasm. And at any given moment you never know which it is! If Brad Pitt weren’t so damn pretty he’d have gotten an Oscar nod for it!
Another big disappointment: Ebert has often completely lost what so separated him from Gene Siskel (and in my mind made him a much better movie critic). Namely Ebert always judged each film with an eye on it’s intent & aspirations. Although I still respected Siskel that was his big problem. He had a specific, unwavering set of criteria that he expected any & every ‘good’ film to live up to. So many an argument between the two was based on this, Ebert telling Gene that he can’t criticize a film for not doing or being something that it was never intended to be. In a way though, it’s what made them such a good combination. After Siskel died I never again found any of Roger’s co-hosts up to the task.
HJis “unvarnished self-reflection” looks suspiciously like “unchecked self-indulgence”, and I truly can’t see how anybody would rank that as the best film of any decade. And there’s a difference in pandering to the audience and having a script that makes sense.
I just re-read it. He said nothing of the kind. He certainly dislikes it, and he offers reasons for his dislike in intelligent, thoughtful, and humorous terms. You very well might disagree with him, but that’s the whole point of opinions about art. It’s the disagreements that make it interesting.
This seems to contradict comments above that complain that Ebert “grades on a curve.”
For what it’s worth, I hardly notice the star ratings. A very low number of stars or a very high number of stars might draw my attention to a particular movie, but I don’t really know what the difference is between two stars and three stars and I don’t really care.
Kaufman would probably agree with you on the former; at a Q&A after a retrospective, he admitted that he expected to be summarily fired and never get another job after submitting his screenplay for Adaptation, which is (aside from his fictional brother Charlie and the third act blowout), more or less an actual recounting of his struggle to adapt The Orchid Thief. And any screenwriter who can construct the intricate plot-turnings of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind can scarcely be accused of being “too lazy or untalented to write a coherent script.”
Well, I do tend to exaggerate a tad. Maybe I was thinking of a different film, but he certainly does seem to think that Fight Club contains a very bad message wrapped in an appealing package.
Maybe I said it wrong, but ‘grading on a curve’ is what I meant when I said he takes a film’s intended audience into account when judging a film (and Siskel did not). Or do you mean others are complaining about something that I consider not a flaw, but a positive attribute?
An example of where, for whatever reason, I feel that Ebert failed at this is in his review of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. He makes a big deal about loving the sweet innocence of the film’s beginning, then after the leads quickly die in a “silly accident” its like he just gave up. He wanted the other sweet romantic comedy and could not accept a zany, dark comedy instead (IOW he did what Siskel always did). And the way he dismisses Michael Keaton’s titular role as “just annoying” I feel was a big disservice to the actor. I think Keaton nailed that character, not quite three dimensional but much more then a cardboard cutout. Much better, I think, than say Jim Carrey’s Mask character.
He can write well, but his reviews have always been very odd and inconsistent. His writing has gotten better since his cancer surgery, but his reviews have gotten even more bizarre. When he strays outside his very limited area of expertise—which is obviously movies—he makes the weirdest comments. He seems to be entirely unfamiliar with literature on some occasions, and sometimes criticizes plot points that were essential to the success of a story that was adapted to a screen play.
His review for War of the Worlds is a prime example. It was a poor adaptation of the original story, with several plot holes introduced by changes and updates, but he doesn’t address those points.
Instead, he talks about the lack of motivation for the invasion. Did he entirely miss the implication of the red weed? Does he not understand the principles of species eradication and subjugation? They were martiforming Earth, wiping out resistant species, and were probably planning on domesticating and “farming” compliant strains of humans later on. While these are not explicitly spelled out, Wells expected an intelligent reader to understand the implications of the invaders’ behavior.
He spends a good part of a couple of paragraphs talking about why he doesn’t find tripod design feasible, mentioning bilateral symmetry (though he probably doesn’t even know that term) and completely ignoring terrestrial species that exhibit radial symmetry. He seems to think that bipedal locomotion is somehow more stable than tripedal, when it’s not.
His cogent comments are about the characters, settings, and images of the movie. Everything else, the “practicality” that he spends far more space on, is based on an extremely shallow understanding of basic science and biology. If he’d stuck to discussing the film, he would have been fine. Instead, he tries to venture into areas he obviously doesn’t understand and makes an idiot of himself.
Ebert was one of the few reviewers I’d read even if I had no interest in seeing the movie at all. He also doesn’t give away spoilers like some of the hacks you run into on RT.
I still check his site from time to time. I enjoyed his rants about 3D ruining everything, for instance.
I’d like to find another, younger, reviewer like him. Most well-known reviewers I can think of are unimpressive to terrible, or maybe just personally annoying to me. David Stratton is good but he’s a generation older than me and enjoys art films more than I do.
The thing is, a review is about giving an informed opinion of a movie, not just an opinion. If you say something that is verifiably wrong, then you are not giving a valid review.
I wish he’d realize there’s no shame in watching a movie twice, once for your general impression, and once so you don’t embarrass yourself saying something wasn’t there that was.
I was about to shut down yesterday when I posted that. Just like to add that the trick is to find a reviewer with similar tastes. Even if he does miss some plot points, we end up feeling about the same for a movie, so we pay most attention to him. I don’t think we’re influenced by him to any great extent, because this also happens with a lot of Chinese and Japanese films that open over here before reaching the US that we watch. Or even that godawful Thor, which opened here before his review came out.
Reviewers can also be used as an opposite gauge. When Ebert’s partner Siskel was alive, I knew if he liked a movie, then chances were I would not.
My biggest disagreement with Ebert used to be his dissing of Raising Arizona. It’s the one Coen Brothers film he hates. I saw it when it first came out and thought it was hilarious. Ebert even admitted one time that he’s told at least once a week that he’s mistaken about Raising Arizona. However, the wife and I watched it two or three months ago, and you know what? It is a godawful piece of shit. I must not have been sober the first time I watched it. The wife is possibly the only Thai Coen Brothers fan, but she’d never seen this one and was left shaking her head.
We also really like his essays in the Great Movies section of his website.
We have a fantastic (IMO) reviewer for our local free weekly: Ken Hanke. I don’t always agree with him (he didn’t realize that Fantastic Mr. Fox is a repellent transformation of a mythopoetic trickster tale into a self-indulgent navel-gazing about the midlife crisis of a middle class man-child, and he didn’t see the glory that was Serenity), but he’s intelligent, funny, and insightful.
There’s a good reviewer for Alabama newspapers named Rick Harmon: very much a “whatever its genre, is it worth seeing for people who like that genre” critic.
Though my favorite of his reviews was probably for the movie MY GIRL (the 1991 Macaulay Culkin/Anna Chlumsky movie) which he compared to (I’m paraphrasing) “something like a nostalgic stroll through Mayberry with quirky but likeable and believable characters and a well realized sense of life in the late '60s” that ends with a great picnic and singalong with Andy and Helen and Aunt Bea and the gang and “everyone has a great time until Barney’s gun goes off and accidentally shoots Opie through the head”.
If for nothing else, I will always be grateful to Ebert for introducing me to the works of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.
Since we seem to be seguing into local reviewers, there used to be a horrible one in Bangkok. A dorky Malaysian who went by the name of Hanuman. Truly dreadful. For instance, he nattered on once about how bad that awful Mary Reilly was – and it was pretty bad – but then he came up with: “Well, I give it five stars, because any movie that has John Malkovich and Glenn Close together deserves that.” He would do that, just randomly throw out seven stars or eight stars without any discernible criteria. His reviews usually consisted mostly of complaining about how difficult the traffic made it getting to the theater or how uncomfortable the seats were in the venue where he’d been watching the movie. Now, that could be entertaining, but he was unable to tell it in an entertaining manner. Sounded more like someone’s mother whining about the rotten neighbors. Although he did have one amusing tale in the early days of cellphones about the audience one time chasing a lady who had used hers during the movie, and she had to barricade herself in the ladies’ room. (Wish they would still do that nowadays.) But he had awful taste. Ace Ventura was especially a hero of his; you could count on at least six or seven stars for any of his films.
Frankly is wasn’t good, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Ebert made it sound. Of course, the premise that aliens have the technology to cross interstellar space, but can’t wipe us out is absurd, but without it you don’t have a movie.
Frankly, I thought it wasn’t nearly as bad as Skyline. I gave up on that movie about half way through.
80’s for me. I’ve never understood all the praise for him. Funny thing is, I’ve always kind of liked the guy himself (on TV), but for me his reviews in print media are worthless.
That’s one of the many reasons I started ignoring his reviews. His reviews always seemed to mention a plot point, verbal exchange, or detail of some sort, that in fact were quite different from what he described in the review. I can’t possibly be the only person to have noticed this.
Another reason I appreciate Ebert is his constant highlighting of the often ridiculously arbitrary nature of the MPAA rating system, such as his note at the end of his recent review for the film Terri.
Yeah. That’s what I was getting at. And I think it comes from his practice of watching a movie once, while taking a bunch of notes. I think he’d do better if he’d watch first to get a general impression, and then go back to get the details. Heck, nowadays, he could even pause and rewind on the second playthrough.
If he did that, I’d pretty much agree with him. His points are usually dead on, in my opinion, but only when he bases them on reality, and not the version of the movie running in his head.
I have to point out one exception to this: kids’ movies. Ebert unfailingly reviewed those from an adult’s point of view, while Siskel tried to review for both grown-ups and kids, and even brought his kids to screenings.
No you can’t. Ebert still reviews all of his movies at a big theater. Companies could send him a Blu-ray of their latest movie on the same day it hits theaters, but they don’t.